Gripped with grief, anxiety and depression, many in China want a national reckoning over the hard-line “zero Covid” policy. Holding the government to account may be a quixotic quest.
Dec. 15, 2022
They posted photos of their positive Covid tests on social media. They described their symptoms as if they were something to be celebrated: fever, cough, fatigue, body ache, loss of taste and smell. They talked about how wonderful it was to no longer be afraid of being sent to quarantine camps for infections and to no longer have to worry about neighbors being locked down for weeks as a result.
“Savor the moment when we are able to get sick,” an independent bookstore owner in Beijing posted on her WeChat timeline. “Let’s protect this most humble right.”
Since the government abruptly dropped its stringent “zero Covid” restrictions last week in the face of rare nationwide protests, much of the Chinese public has embraced a new life. They have been eager to gain back some of their basic rights, even if it means the virus is now spreading quickly.
But beneath the relief is a collective and profound trauma that will not be easy to heal. Gripped with grief, anxiety and depression, people want a national reckoning of what went wrong. Many are now on an almost quixotic quest in the belief that the government should acknowledge its harsh policies were a severe mistake and should apologize for the harm it has caused.
The line outside a pharmacy earlier this week in Beijing, which is dealing with a surge in Covid cases. Credit…Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Li Gongming, an art historian and a former member of a political advisory group run by the Chinese Communist Party, posted an article on the social media platform WeChat, urging the government of the southern city of Guangzhou to help heal the emotional and social wounds from the pandemic.
“The first step should probably start with acknowledging the mistake, offering condolences to the deceased and apologizing to the public,” he wrote. “It should be followed by holding people accountable and by making the government pay for compensations.”
His article, published Monday, was quickly deleted.
Another WeChat article, under the pen name “Banchizi,” urged the public to hold officials accountable for the heavy cost paid under the “zero Covid” policy, which it called “a silly farce.”
An apology might not suffice for some health officials who lied and misled the nation, the article said; they should be prosecuted.
The author urged the country to tabulate the collateral deaths — those from suicides, from medical treatments that were delayed or denied, and from accidents related to the pandemic restrictions.
China rarely releases the names and identities of the victims of tragedies thought to be connected to “zero Covid.” One such incident was when 27 people died in a bus accident on their way to a quarantine facility in the southwestern province of Guizhou. Another was when 10 people perished in an apartment fire in the western city Urumqi, an event that triggered the mass street protests last month.
Tabulating their names and how they died is the “least respect we can pay to the deceased,” said the article by Banchizi.
It, too, was deleted.
Social media users called out some of the top health experts who talked up the dangers of the omicron variant to support the government’s “zero Covid” policy, only to change their messages after the 180-degree policy change. People circulated screenshots of different headlines of the official People’s Daily in recent months, joking that the newspaper is always right on the day it is published, but it contradicts itself when it’s later bound together with other editions.
People I interviewed told me that they want the government to apologize because it would offer some comfort for what they have endured.
Zhang, a college senior in eastern Jiangsu Province who asked to be identified only by her surname, has had to take more than 100 Covid tests this year and was locked down for a total of four months, including much of the fall semester. She feels depressed, finds it hard to become motivated and cries easily when reading news about Covid.
A Covid testing booth in Shanghai earlier this month. One college senior in Jiangsu Province, near Shanghai, said she has had to take more than 100 Covid tests this year.Credit…The New York Times
She believed the government’s misinformation about the pandemic in the West, so she supported locking down Shanghai in April, a position she now regrets. Now knowing better, she wants the party to apologize to “all the innocent people who died under ‘zero Covid,’ people who lost their income under lockdowns and all the people who were brainwashed by the propaganda machine,” she said.
Like Ms. Zhang, most people I interviewed for this column only want to be identified by a single name for safety concerns.
In a normal society, for a policy mistake as severe as “zero Covid,” the public would demand more than an apology, said Yan, a project manager at an internet company in Beijing. “They would have wanted a new ruling party. But it’s a different matter in the Chinese context.”
Everybody I talked to believes that the government should apologize, but no one expects it will. The Communist Party can only be “great, glorious and correct,” they said, per its own description in many official speeches. And Xi Jinping, the country’s top leader, has silenced nearly all dissent and criticism of his leadership.
“The call for apology is very brave, and I want it, too,” said Yan. “But it’s very unlikely to happen.”
The Communist Party has never apologized to the Chinese people for any of the atrocities they have suffered during its 73 years in power. Not after more than 20 million people starved to death during the disastrous Great Leap Forward, nor when the country was thrown into a decade of chaos and economic destruction by the Cultural Revolution. And not for the one-child policy that imposed many forced abortions and is now helping foment a demographic crisis with one of the fastest-aging populations in the world.
The party even killed a literary genre called “scar literature,” which emerged after the Cultural Revolution in late 1970s and portrayed the sufferings that people endured during that political campaign. The party never wants anybody to focus too much on their scars because they would inevitably ask where the scars came from, said Xu Chenggang, a senior research scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.
Hu Xijin, a top party propagandist, senses dangers in all the demands for an apology. In a long article on the social media platform Weibo, where he has nearly 25 million followers, he wrote that the people who called the “zero Covid” policy a “man-made disaster” are too “radical.”
The post triggered an outcry of anger and disappointment. Many college students noted that they felt like prisoners on their campuses. A commenter from Shanghai said their child was locked down in a 600-square-foot apartment for three months. “Isn’t this something that we should reflect on? Shouldn’t we try to stop this from happening again and keep the power on check?” the commenter asked.
The party has stepped in to control the narrative. In a front-page commentary on Thursday, the People’s Daily, the party’s official newspaper, talked up how the country is coming back to life. Then it spent more than 10,000 words praising how the party and Mr. Xi guided the country through the pandemic.
Since China dropped its “zero Covid” policy last week, the ruling Communist Party has tried to control the narrative.Credit…Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
“Practice has fully proved that the Communist Party of China,” it said, “is the most reliable backbone of the Chinese people when storms strike.”
It is a clear signal that the government will stick to its victorious messaging. It wants the public to accept its narrative, forget about what happened to them and move on.
Some have anticipated such moves and are determined to fight back against the collective amnesia that the nation has suffered for too long. It’s their own way to cope with the trauma.
Yu, a programmer in his mid-30s, chokes up whenever he talks about the lockdown in Shanghai in the spring of this year. “I felt like I was knocked down by the government and hammered for three months,” he said. “Then it told me that it did it for the sake of my well-being.”
He is still having two recurring nightmares. In one, he would be in a war zone full of barbed wires and filled with poisonous air. In the other, he would hear a monotonous voice repeatedly blasting from a loudspeaker, “Come down to get tested for Covid.” Then would come his test results: negative, positive, negative, positive.
He believes that it’s important to write down what happened. He spent the summer on an electronic book, compiling government announcements and credible online information about what happened to the 25 million Shanghai residents between March and July. He believes that it would be obvious to anybody how much the government lied and how brutally it treated the people.
“It was like an absurd nightmare,” he wrote in the introduction. “I can’t help but ask why tragedies like this keep happening to the Chinese people.”